Embracing Indian creative workflow

Any kind of digital creative content – whether it is a simple newspaper advert, or a large hoarding, or laying out a complicated magazine or a newspaper – comprises of handling text. Creating such a content for regional audience with software not supporting Indian scripts is like driving a left-hand-drive car in India – not comfortable at all.

How does a customer-oriented company like Adobe approach these users in the Indian subcontinent? Internal research shows that users in India are comfortable using English interface for software – what’s really needed is the ability to compose and handle text in Indic scripts, more so in text publication workflows.

While the publishing workflow is largely based on Adobe InDesign and we started supporting 10 of the most popular languages in Adobe InDesign CS6, there was a need to bridge the gap with other publication workflows utilizing Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Adobe did so with the latest release of Creative Cloud products by introducing Indic script support in Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC. Users can now compose their text in 10 regional languages, generate world class print output, and still be within their beloved Adobe environment.

The Creative Workflow

Common workflows in creation of digital content involve extensive flow of content cross InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Photographs are clicked with the digital cameras and are beautified in Photoshop. These are brought into Illustrator and converted to vector images and are further used as a part of an art work. Small sections of these images (even raster forms) could as well be converted to form a brush stroke in Illustrator CC. A complex artwork including raster images and vector art is finally rendered to print through an InDesign document, which blends this graphic with text stories to give a phenomenal impact to readers.

Such meshed workflows often use text at various places, and the users ought to be able to work with that text whenever needed in the workflow. They don’t want to wait until the artwork is placed into InDesign for them to be able to insert text in regional languages.

Covering the entire flow

As a creative professional, one always wonders if they could do some raster handling in Illustrator, or some type handling in Photoshop, or some vector handling in InDesign. All of these are possible with Adobe software today, and that makes using these three in our publication workflows so very seamless. Not only that, we also want to create that beautiful type effect in Illustrator using Indic characters in our regional language. We want to give titles to our Photoshop banners in our own language. And much more…

With the latest CC release, joining the excitement of the amazing features, Photoshop and Illustrator also provide support for Indic scripts as in InDesign.

What’s more? The overall experience with Indic scripts has been made far richer with a number of bug fixes.

Adobe Fonts:

In addition to extending Indic script support to Photoshop and Illustrator, we appreciate the need for Adobe fonts in languages other than Hindi. Well-designed Unicode fonts that support Indian scripts can enhance productivity and cross-compatibility of content created by creative users, including the content creators, the designers, and the editors. We thus took this initiative of providing this beautiful set of fonts, starting with Adobe Devanagri.

Adobe Devanagri was introduced in CS6 timeframe, and has now been extended to include the Marathi script as well.

A completely new font, Adobe Gurmukhi has also been introduced. This will come pre-installed for users to start creating content in Punjabi. Also, fonts for more Indian languages are on their way!

To read about the Indic support in InDesign CS6, please read this article.